Poems February 2018

Twenty

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—“One buck then would be like ten bucks now.”

Doubled over, broken flat, and pressed In through a slit no one could see, the bill, Latent behind his Rail Clerks Union card, Had spent its life in darkness, waiting till The day he put my loyalty to the test. Out came Jackson’s frozen pompadour, That gray meringue piled on the hickory-hard Face; now I was a co-conspirator With someone who had only fathered me A scant eight years before. His whisper made A big boy out of me, but even more, A child of him: “Your mom will never see This. Just the two of us.” Grisaille-and-jade, It went back in, its crease a razor blade.

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Len Krisak’s most recent book is a complete translation of Rilke’s New Poems (Boydell & Brewer).